The present invention relates to buying and selling products on the Internet, and in particular to providing customized offers for e-commerce.
When purchasing goods, most websites follow a model popularized by Amazon.com and others. The user first selects a product to purchase from a product webpage then must navigate through checkout pages on separate web pages. Similarly, when selling goods, a user may create a website or go to a website such as eBay.com to list his product for sale. The requirement of navigating through numerous checkout pages can often be tedious and the requirement to go to a particular website to make a sale or purchase fails to actively entice users of web browsers to consume goods.
Ads take many forms on the internet. Typically, a “banner ad” is a rectangular graphic element on a webpage and has artwork and a product description along with a hyperlink. If the user clicks on the ad, the user is taken to the website offering the product or service. There are also other types of ads, such as pop-up ads, ads that incorporate video, pop-under ads and floating ads. These ads typically describe one product or service, or a class of products or services. There are also dynamically alterable banner ads. These ads can scroll either horizontally or vertically.
A number of techniques exist for providing ads in web pages. A banner ad is generally produced by embedding HTML code for that banner within the HTML coding for a given web page. Consumers can obtain more information by clicking through the ad, thus being referred to the advertiser's site, and click through counts can be monitored. Interstitial ads are displayed in an interval of time that occurs after a user has clicked on a hot-link displayed by a browser to retrieve a desired web page but before that browser has started rendering that page. Ads can also be provided via a “push” application program that connects with a server, typically during off-hours. Ads are downloaded for later display. A user profile is used to determine the type of ads for that user. Real-time downloading and rendering of advertising HTML files uses advertising files stored on remote web servers. These ads show content in a “streamed” media file that relies on a continuous real-time network connection existing to a remote web server.
While banner ads often attempt to entice users of web browsers to consume goods, they often fall short since they require users to be taken to other websites and typically engage in numerous web page transitions to purchase a good. The end result is that the conversion rate is lower than it otherwise could be because of these traditional requirements.